The Fifth Sun: Aztec Gods, Aztec World 9780292756045

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The Fifth Sun

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THE TEXAS P A N AMERICAN SERIES

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The Fifth Sun

Aztec Gods, Aztec World By Burr Cartwright Brundage Illustrated by Roy E. Anderson

University of Texas Press, Austin

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The Texas Pan American Series is published with the assistance of a revolving publication fund established by the Pan American Sulphur Company Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Brundage, Burr Cartwright, 1912The fifth sun. (The Texas Pan American series) Bibliography: p . Includes index. 1. Aztecs-Religion and mythology. 2. Indians of Mexico-Religion and mythology. I. Title. F1219.3.R38B7

299'.7

78-12562

ISBN 0-292-72427-6

Copyright © 1979 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-292-75604-5 (library e-book) ISBN 978-0-292-75605-2 (individual e-book)

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To My Beloved Wife, Jini

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Contents

Introduction xi 1.

The World, the Heavens, and Time 3

2.

Creation and the Role of Paradise 30

3.

The Quality of the Numinous 50

4.

Tezcatlipoca 80

5.

Quetzalcoatl 102

6.

The Making of Huitzilopochtli 129

7.

The Goddesses 153

8.

Man 176

9.

The Nuclear Cult: War, Sacrifice, and Cannibalism 195 Epilogue 220 Notes 223 Bibliography 251 Index 259

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In the year 23 Reed, So they say, it first appeared. The sun that now exists Was born then. This is the fifth sun, Its date-sign is 4 Movement. It is called Movement Sun Because on that day it began to move. The old people say That in this age earthquakes will occur And there will come starvation And we shall perish. - A N A L E S DE CUAUHTITLAN

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Introduction

In this work I present an outline of the world view of the Aztec people. I believe that the parts of this view add up to a comprehensive whole, though I am under no illusions that my approach will be accepted by all scholars in the field. Only recently Munro S. Edmonson wrote, "The world view of the Aztecs remains substantially problematic." This book is not a monograph and should not be judged as such. It is a compendious handling of the subject of the Aztec appreciation of the universe and should serve as a reference work, as a work to enlighten scholars in other fields, and as a clearly written work for the intelligent layperson interested in such material. I have had these readers in mind throughout the writing of this book, which is why I have omitted almost all references in the text itself to contemporary scholarship. The layperson, the teacher, or the scholar in another field does not need such references. The subject of how much documentation to introduce was difficult. The original draft of the work had over two hundred pages of notes, backing up virtually every statement. This was reduced progressively to the documentation appearing at the end of the book. Some of the notes remain lengthy, but these may be useful to the expert who wishes to look behind the statement in the text. I have never hesitated to offer interpretations and analyses deriving from my own scholarship. Some of the interpretations are new, some are based on insights of other laborers in the vineyard. My insistence, however, on the outrance which marks Aztec religion might be considered new, as also might be my treatment of Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli. The final test of the usefulness of any overview of the Aztec understanding of life and the world will in any case be the extent to which it explicates and is consistent with Aztec history. I have made only

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xii Introduction glancing references in the text (except in chapter 6) to historical concordances, for to have treated the relevancies of Aztec history and the Aztec world view would have necessitated a far longer and certainly^ an unwieldy book. Similarly with the subject of Aztec ritual. The first draft of this work contained several chapters on that closely related subject, but again considerations of length dictated a radical telescoping of this material. It is hoped that another volume will follow on this subject of the Aztec cult. Now that volumes XII through XV of the Handbook of Middle American Indians are out, with their magnificent review and analysis of the bibliography pertinent to this subject, I do not need to offer an evaluation of sources. The sources upon which I principally leaned, however, can be briefly mentioned. First there is the indispensable Bernardino de Sahagun, whom I used constantly, both in his Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espana as well as in the twelve volumes of the Florentine Codex. The various volumes of translation and commentary on Sahagun in the series Fuentes indigenas de la cultura Ndhuatl: Textos de los informantes de Sahagun were also used. Sahagun's towering importance can be seen not only in the references to him in the volumes of HMAI mentioned above but in the recent work edited by Edmonson, SixteenthCentury Mexico: The Work ofSahagun (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974). Diego Duran certainly came next. His Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana was of great importance, especially in details relating to the Aztec gods. Following these two I relied heavily for mythology on the old standbys: the Anales de Cuauhtitlan, the Leyenda de los Soles, the Histoyre du Mechique, and the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus pinturas. Other early sources drawn on extensively were Mendieta, Tezozomoc, Motolinia, Serna, Alarcon, Ponce, Pomar, and the three volumes of Garibay's Poesia Ndhuatl. Under the rubric of modern scholarship I have relied heavily on the five volumes of Seler's Gesammelte Abhandlungen, which has now been rendered eminently useful by the addition of an exhaustive index volume. The two volumes of Beyer's collected articles (Mito y simbologia and Gen ahos de arqueologia mexicana) were also useful as were, naturally, the twelve volumes (to date) of the Estudios de cultura Ndhuatl published by the University of Mexico. Nor should I forget to mention Bodo Spranz' Los dioses en los codices mexicanos del grupo Borgia, a work of painstaking care and erudition.

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Introduction | xiii Along with such sources and secondary works, I have consulted the pertinent codices. The codices are prime religious documents but, except in such cases as the Magliabecchiano, the Tudela, the Telleriano-Remensis, and the Vaticanus Latino, which have accompanying texts in Spanish or Italian, they require the greatest caution, for the interpretation of any particular scene is often questionable. I have perhaps been unduly reluctant to use them except where their meaning is fairly straightforward. The American Philosophical Society aided in the production of this work With a grant for research in Mexico. I am most grateful for this aid. I am also in the debt of Professor J. Richard Andrews, whose Introduction to Classical Nahuatl (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975) has been of great assistance. In addition, Professor Andrews has been most kind in responding to my request for help in the translation of certain of the Aztec names in this work. He has saved me from some egregious errors. A word must be said about the illustrations in this book. Because a purely literary treatment of such a religion as that practiced by the Aztecs is inadequate to define its power and angularity, line drawings of some sort were judged by myself and the Press to be called for. I was most fortunate to interest the Florida artist, Mr. Roy E. Anderson, in this project. Mr. Anderson has made faithful copies of those parts of seven of the well-known codices which I designated to him, but he has nevertheless retained his own line in the process. He has also simplified the originals where details and shading would have been superfluous. The emblems which stand at the head of each chapter are taken from the Tonalamatl of the Codex Borgia to provide some consistency of style. The twenty-two larger illustrations scattered through the body of the text were chosen, however, not only from the Borgia but from Borbonicus, Cospi, Laud, Magliabecchiano, Nuttall, and Vindobonensis. I wish to express my gratitude for Mr. Anderson's efforts. He has signally embellished the book.

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The Fifth Sun

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i. The World, the Heavens, and Time

The Four Directions and the Center On a day in the past-perhaps somewhere around the year A.D. 1250 -the great Chichimec conqueror Xolotl solemnized his newly won possession of lands in Central Mexico formerly belonging to the Toltecs. He did this by dispatching four arrows from a mountaintop, one toward each of the four directions. A cable of dried grass, coarsely twined, was placed in the shape of a ring on the ground and burned, the ashes being scattered also to the four winds.1 This custom bears importantly on our survey of the world view of the Aztecs. Its interpretation seems easy. The Aztec universe was explicated, as throughout Mesoamerica, in terms of five directions: the center (where Xolotl's archer stood) and the four cardinal directions. The arrows shot from the Chichimec bow went forth to the four directions, each carrying the message of new possession. The burning ring of grass represented the circumambience of the edge of the world and the winnowing of the ashes added the peremptory notion of imperial frontiers. The Aztec world then was not undefined. It had an undergirding of conceptual supports and a structure which was easily understood. The role which the five directions played in the lives of the Aztecs was basic. When Aztec man put himself in the place of the rising sun, the path straight ahead of him led westward. This then was the orientation of the whole world. The north was defined as his right hand

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4 | The World, the Heavens, and Time and the south as his left hand. The four directions had been made explicit for him by the sun god himself, who, by first bringing day into the world, once and for all had proclaimed what was to be the correct orientation. A myth enshrined this wisdom. 2 The four gods who were to aid in the appearance of the present or fifth sun had been sitting, just before his rising, in stygian blackness. They had fallen into a dispute as to which horizon would be honored by his first appearance; each god in his vigil therefore faced the direction he preferred and prophesied accordingly. Thus were the four directions each placed under a special patronage, while the fact that the sun rose finally in the east prescribed, as we have already seen, the final orientation of the universe. This structure of the universe was also proclaimed in Aztec cult. At one point in the feast of the fire god four priests descended from his shrine, each carrying a blazing pine torch; they did reverence to each of the four cardinal directions (in the order east/north/west/ south), after which the four brands were cast into the god's ever burning brazier. 3 In this ritual act the center of all things was defined as the abode of the central fire, with the four directions construed as emanations from that point. To this fundamental structure of the universe all things had to conform. A city, for instance, could be laid out as a microcosm of the universe. Tenochtitlan, capital of the Mexican Aztecs, had as its focal area the temenos of the gods, an enclosed compound crowded with temples and other sacred buildings symbolizing the universal center. The principal temple, enshrining the two gods Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, was correctly interpreted as standing in the east and therefore being oriented toward the west. Four axial roads, leading east, north, west, and south, emanated from this focal area and thus pointed to the four quarters of the city. This was not merely an urban convenience for the Mexican Aztecs-it was a necessity imposed upon pious men everywhere who knew how to read the grand designs of the universe and who desired to conform to them in their works. But there was more to the structure of the cosmos than just the extension of hallowed coordinates. Each of the five directions possessed a special name, color, and associated symbol, though these vary depending on the source we consult. 4 The Aztecs considered that the node where the coordinates crossed was itself a direction-in fact it was considered the primary direction.

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The World, the Heavens, and Time | 5 There, without any violation of its metaphorical meaning, the tetrad became pentad. Indeed the number 4 could not be considered fully meaningful by the Aztecs unless completed as 5. To the Aztecs this center was held by the most ancient of all the gods, the god of fire, whose name was Xiuhteuctli, Lord of the Year. He is located in the center quite obviously because the hearth, in all lands and in all times, has always been the point around which life has gravitated, and it was the fire god who postured and danced in the center of that hearth. Viewed geographically rather than metaphorically, his domain was in the center of the earth, deep underground; volcanoes were the vents through which his subterranean flames escaped. Besides this ultimate manifestation in the earth's navel, Xiuhteuctli existed in four other transfigurations, each properly colored to conform to the directional system. In the year-end feast four victims, colored to correspond to the directions, were sacrificed. For purposes of that important event they were in quadruplicate the very person of the fire god. Each direction was sacred, but the peculiar quality of the center was its extreme venerability. While the fire god was in no sense an earth god, he was responsible for the rational ordering that gave meaning to the earth. There were other sets of symbols associated with the five directions.5 In addition to patron gods and colors, there were associated sets of birds, trees, dragons, and other animals and year symbols, all of which were used to further embellish the qualities of the five directions. Here then was the orderly structure of the cosmos. The system expressed first the sacredness of the world. The earth upon which the Aztec walked, in whatever direction he might travel, in war or in peace, warned him of its divine probabilities and its inner purposes. However deserted and savage it might appear when he contemplated it, the world even beyond his own horizon presented much the same holiness as when he was at home in the center. If in the company of merchants he should walk for a thousand miles into the north, nothing would change in the somber face that direction showed him; its valleys and steppes would always be haunted by the larval dead. Should he travel east it was always toward blithe gods and good adventures. Thus the earth possessed a variously qualified holiness that was made clear in the climaxing metaphor of the four directions and the center. Second, this system expressed the Aztec's closeness to the hub of things. He was always in or close to the center. He was of course aware that he could not move out along one of the directional axes

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6

The World, the Heavens, and Time

and come upon that special mythic tree which there supported the sky or displayed in its branches the bird which further identified it. His only knowledge was that he inhabited the center and that the earth there was his home. This centrality gave the Aztec a sense of urgency and importance; things of moment could take place only in the center. This made him acutely receptive to divine demands. Third, the system perfectly expressed that sense of spacious architecture congenial to the Aztec people. It was the opposite of that capriciousness of which there was already a sufficiency among gods and men. Answering his need to perceive the created world as orderly, this world scaffolding was indispensable to the Aztec. The four directions and the center assured him of the flawlessness of the entire structure.

The Sea and the Sky Like many other peoples those of Mesoamerica believed that the earth floated in the midst of the sea. Mesoamerica lay like a lessening wedge of land between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico; to those on the shores, these bodies of water seemed to be endless. The sea was not a special element at all, nothing that one could contrast or compare with anything else, but a marvel: It is great. It terrifies, it frightens one. It is that which is irresistible; a great marvel; foaming, glistening with waves; bitter -very bitter, most bitter; very salty. It has man-eating animals, animal life. It is that which surges. It stirs; it stretches illsmelling, restless.6 The sea was thought to extend outward and upward until-like the walls of a cosmic house-it merged with the sky, which then appeared to be the ceiling of a towering edifice.7 Sea and sky were thus one substance, but the sea was more curdled; this explains the name given to the sea, "sky waters/' 8 The sky therefore was known to contain waters which might in perilous times descend in deluges, annihilating men. This indeed had happened once in the past when the sky collapsed upon the earth. It had been a difficult matter at that juncture for the gods to put the sky back and steady it again. This had been accomplished when four divine atlantes were posted at each of the world corners and two great world trees, probably aligned on an

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The World, the Heavens, and Tune | 7 east-west axis, were erected to support the sky.9 Other versions say there were four trees, one at each of the four heavenly corners. This view of the sky as a great lake of waters overhead was based on observations commonly made by early men and was not unique to the Aztecs. Beyond this the Aztec priesthood had inherited a view which was theological and intellectual. This view they used to explain the function of the sky and its structural foundations in the earth. According to this schema there were thirteen ascending levels which made up the whole.10 The lowest level was defined as the abode of the god of fire and was centered in the earth. This level symbolized the idea of a hub from which all directions, including the upward direction, emanated. The surface of the earth counted as the first level and above this were the various heavenly terraces, each the abode of some astral or atmospheric presence or of one of the great gods. The uppermost tier was Omeyocan, the seat of divine authority. The sun, the moon, and the stars inhabited lower courses. It is doubtful that this priestly construction counted for much with the average Aztec. In his assessment of the heavens it was the visible sun and the courses of the stars which gave him his crucial knowledge, not the speculations of the learned. Like all Mesoamericans the Aztecs were vigilant observers of the heavens. Their ancestors, the wandering Chichimecs, considered the sun to be their father, and they drew attention to this affiliation by wearing on their backs an appropriate emblem, generally a sunburst of yellow parrot feathers. The sun was that celestial object excelling all others in lordliness and in the daily drama of his appearances and his exits. He was therefor^a focal point of Chichimec mythology. He was called Tonatiuh, literally He Who Goes Forth Shining. In the night skies there was no such splendor. Instead there was a richness of astral beings, crowding and wheeling about. The stars were their eyes. The Milky Way was a road across this sky and was presided over by two divinities: the male Citlallatonac, Starshine, and the female Citlalinicue, Star Skirt. Viewed in another sense, the Milky Way was itself the body of that Great Mother out of whose tenebrous womb had once poured the sun and the moon and the stars.11 The constellations bore names and were watched as they threaded their way through the seasons. But no star possessed such magic as that planet which both foreruns and follows the sun. To the Aztecs the planet Venus was a warrior, a valiant champion whose challenges to the sun were dire and constant. The malevolence of

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8 The World, the Heavens, and Time Venus was well known; he was called the Great Star. As for the moon the Aztecs condemned it as an ashen replica of the sun and as something of a coward. It could also be thought of as a basin that held in its expanding and contracting interior the waters of the sky. Considered as a deity the moon was Tlazolteotl, an ancient goddess of singular power found on the Gulf coast.12 Star lore formed a significant part of Aztec culture. The solemnity of the spangled vault of the night sky, the silences between the stars and along the galactic wheel, profoundly affected the Aztec. We can understand why the astral aspect of his religion was so compelling to him. In the night sky he could read, beside his own dooms, the frozen words of all the gods. Every large magnitude star and the constellations were identified with one of the gods, and the host of stars together could be thought of as demonic tzitzimime, monsters of death and destruction.13

The Ball Game In the ruins of many ancient sites in Mesoamerica and even in our own Southwest, there appears an edifice called the tlachco, or ball court. It is of singular importance for our study of Aztec belief; a description of it is therefore in order. In its classic form the tlachco was a narrow and extended gallery carefully leveled and often paved; its sides could be either shallowly sloped or perpendicular. The ends of the court were short transverse runways attached in such a way that the ground plan resembled a capital I. Entry into the playing area was made via transverses, either through breaks in the enclosing wall or down stairways from the spectators' ledge. Two sheds or small temples were often placed on top of the end walls and thus commanded a longitudinal view of the playing field below. Set into the ground directly in the center of the court was sometimes found a circular stone, while running through this from center wall to center wall was a painted line marking the limits for each team. Representations in the codices of the ground plan of the tlachco show it sometimes divided into four sections, each colored differently, for it too could conform to the cosmic orientation. Occasionally two stone rings, each perforated, protruded from the center of the side walls into the court. In most cases the whole playing field was sunken appreciably below ground level. Spectators sat

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The World, the Heavens, and Time | 9

Two princes wagering in the tlachco (Nuttall) or stood on the side and end walls and looked down on the sport. The game played in that court was tlachtli, an exhausting and often dangerous contest necessitating great skill. Tlachtli has a very old history in Mesoamerica. According to the prevailing theory, the game originated in the Gulf lowlands. There men had learned to make resilient solid balls from the sap of the rubber tree. These burned fiercely and were primarily offered up as incense in certain cult performances. The most astonishing property of the ball, however-apart from the large volume of smoke it emitted when burning-was its mercurial movement when thrown, and from this feature a game early evolved which was closely tied into the religious cult. If the La Venta people of southern Vera Cruz (ca. 1250900 B.C.) invented the game, as many think, then it could have been their merchants who not only carried it to the far corners of Mesoamerica but inevitably carried with it associated religious concepts. The sensational properties of the rubber ball-unlike anything else known-must have validated and heightened the impact of the cult. By 300 B.C. the game was fully developed. As a result of the wide dissemination of tlachtli its rules changed radically in the course of centuries. At first thrown by hand, the ball was later propelled with bats. By the time the Spaniards appeared players were limited to bouncing the ball off their hips or knees, no

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io I The World, the Heavens, and Time

other parts of the body being used. In this final stage of the game as few as two players could duel against each other, though as many as six might compete. The appearance of the courts also changed. At first they had simply been level fields marked by two symbolic standards placed at the ends of the long axis. Next they were encased in earth or masonry walls, and finally out of the walls protruded the stone hoops through which the players attempted to drive the ball. All such alterations must have reflected new understandings of the meaning of the game and therefore new cosmologies.

The Meaning of the Ball Game The salient features of the tlachco are its narrowness and its pronounced length, plus the fact that it is generally sunken or given the appearance of being let down into the earth.14 This is a significant form; it was undoubtedly thought to represent a straight runway or concourse in the underworld along which was fought out a contest involving the passage of a round flying object.15 This flying object is the sun, here thought to be fallen under the western horizon and caught among nocturnal enemies. The conflict among the players in the ball game is equivalent to the attempt of the sun to struggle through the black sky of the underworld, to avoid entrapment, and to attain a heroic exit into the world above the earth. The two perforated stone rings will have symbolized the holes through which the sun entered the earth at evening and through which he emerged at dawn. If this theory is correct, tlachtli is a sacred drama depicting a natural tragedy: the nocturnal death and captivity of the sun. What has confused some researchers has been the obvious equivalence between the tlachco and the night sky on the one hand and, on the other, the equally obvious equivalence between the tlachco and the underworld. The one might seem to prohibit the other. Such is not the case. In the underworld the sun blunders through a thick and obscure sky peopled with enemies. This sky is indeed under the earth but it is not Mictlan, the abode of the dead; rather, it is a hippodrome through which-at full drive and at great odds-the wounded sun hurtles his way. This chthonic sky is nevertheless the night sky that smoothly rotates above our heads. They are one and the same. Thus the stars that swing up out of the east after the sun has set are by definition the sun's enemies. Like winking conspirators they throng around him in the darkness and subdue him. To

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The World, the Heavens, and Time \ 11

us the firmament at night is a thing of beauty, but it was not beautiful to the Aztecs. In their close and suffocating silence the stars were thought of as dangerous influences. The fact that the tlachco symbolized the night sky can be appreciated in the fact that before important games it had to be rededicated by a priest in a midnight ceremony.16 As for its being also the underearth, we note not only the four equal areas of the court (each of the divisions or directions being separately colored when depicted in the codices) but the fact that the circular flagstone in the exact center of the court represented the nadir or middle point in the underworld and was appropriately called itzompan, "its end." Quetzalcoatl was said to have opened up this hole into the deepest part of the world. There is another theory concerning the meaning of the game of tlachtli, based on the typical north-south orientation of the court itself: it represents the sun's seasonal, rather than his diurnal, peregrination. There is much in this theory to recommend it; certainly the peoples of Mesoamerica were vividly aware of the great solstitial rhythm.17 But we must now describe the role of the gods in relation to the game. Two divinities presided over it, one being the patron of the ball, the other being the patron of the court.18 There can be little doubt that the one god represented the solar party and the other god represented the astral demons of the underworld or, if directionally interpreted, the exit from and the entry to the underworld. In Tenochtitlan the god specifically involved in the game was that transfiguration of Huitzilopochtli known as Huitznahuatl, the Southerner, a name celebrating the former god's foray against the Four Hundred Southerners, the stars, at the time of his birth.19 As the Mexicans grew to imperial stature, their god Huitzilopochtli took over some of the mythology of the sun and is thus, not unexpectedly, connected with the tlachco. A well-known variant of the myth of the gigantomachy, which we will comment on later, has Huitzilopochtli doing battle with the Four Hundred in a tlachco, defeating and then sacrificing them on the field. The Four Hundred are thus his enemies in the firmament of the underworld. On his feast day in Tenochtitlan the magnates gathered at ball courts to play tlachtli and victims were sacrificed there. Indeed, a shrine of Huitzilopochtli was inconceivable without an adjoining tlachco, itself considered to be a temple. In Aztec myth a game of tlachtli that changed the course of the present aeon was once played between the gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca. During the game, which was to decide who of the two

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12 | The World, the Heavens, and Time

was to be the sun, Tezcatlipoca changed into a jaguar, thus achieving victory.20 The appearance of the jaguar motif here is instructive, for that animal with its spotted coat represented to almost all peoples in Mesoamerica both the night sky glittering with stars and the interior of the earth. We have seen that the tlachco was conceived to be a temple, and it should not surprise us that human sacrifice was involved. From various archaeological sources we know that in a special ritual performance of the game the captain of the losing team was beheaded over the center stone, his blood symbolically pouring down that conduit into the earth's bowels. It could be that this sacrifice was a reenactment of that death which the sun suffered at his nadir or an atonement for it. It could be that the losing team, in the very act of losing, was thought to have been transformed into a group of the sun's adherents, whereas the winning side became, on the same showing, the forces of darkness.21 Behind the tlachco and the contests that took place therein lay a most imposing conception. Indeed, as a product of the human imagination, the Mesoamerican ball game has seldom been surpassed. A choice had been presented to the Aztecs-to celebrate, as central in their religion, the march of the sun through the daylight hours, depicting him as unthreatened and unconquerable, or to stress the fateful and quixotic character of his course, ending in the extinction of light and life. The Aztecs, borrowing from their predecessors, chose the latter and thereby revealed their special feeling for the dark and the malign. They felt ritually at home in darkness. The statements they made about the cosmos were appreciative of its majesty, but they placed over the face of that majesty a mask of defeat and ill omen.

Time Even more mysterious to men than the world itself are the nature and direction of its changes. The earth can be seen and walked upon, but time is never more than an impalpable reality at best. The impulsions of time are easily and everywhere apparent, from the sequence of the seasons to the birth and death of all organisms. Like a dark current it sweeps men along, and their complaints mean nothing to it. What men object to is its tragic directionality. They know that the essence of time is change and that this indeed is the struc-

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ture of life, but they are shattered when they contemplate the fact that what begins in vigor marches only and always toward decay. In their search for a formula that would more fully explain the character of time, the Aztecs isolated a profane and a sacred time, each with its separate calendar.22 Let us begin with their concept of profane or, as we may well call it, natural time.

The Xihuitl or Natural Year Xihuitl is the Nahuatl word for grass or a stem of grass, a branch, or leafage in general. Probably from this as a primary meaning were derived the following secondary meanings: the color green, the turquoise, and, finally, year. We can see how xihuitl could come to mean "year" if we suppose it to have been interpreted as "the time of verdure" or "the time of the new grass." The word would thus have been related to the experience of the Aztecs with the revolving year of nature, in other words with the recurrent spring. In the crude Aztec system of writing, the picture of the worked turquoise was the glyph for year. This year was our solar year of 365 days. The basic datum we must begin with is the number 20, cempohualli or "one full count," referring to the total number of fingers and toes which a person possessed. The idea of a score contained the idea of totality, an implicit understanding that the number 20 cannot be, or should not be, exceeded, that it is in fact a closed or perfect number. A natural year complete with two equinoxes is also a totality. It cannot progress beyond what the preceding year attained, thus becoming thereby something different. The year preceding it was a completed span of time and was without connections. Then another year began, taking its place but in no way indebted to it. The fact that the year is a totality meant that, to the Aztecs, the number 20 could aptly be applied to it in order to break it up and organize its inner structure. In our modern calendar we understand the year in a different fashion, namely in terms of a consecution of months or lunations. Thus we arrive at a number close to 12. The Mesoamericans applied the abstract number 20 to the year and by reckoning came out with eighteen periods of 20 days each, the whole equaling 360. Thus the perfect number 20 brought the Aztecs close to our year of 365 days but could not account for the 5 1/4 days left over. The fault was not in the cempohualli, which was by definition perfect, but in

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14 | The World, the Heavens, and Time the incommensurable number of days remaining. Though necessary to complete the solar year, these days technically could not be counted. They did not exist in the xihuitl at all. They were therefore relegated to the status of nemontemi, five uncountable and unnamed days whose ominous and purposeless character derived from their lack of a patron deity. Nemontemi may be freely translated as "they complete the count of the year without profit." The xihuitl was understood by the Aztecs very much as we understand our solar year. To them it was a series of eighteen groupings of twenty days each, roughly corresponding to our months, each group distinctively named and all following each other in an immutable order. Each set of twenty days had a special religious orientation which culminated in a great ritual on the last day of the twenty. It was in fact through the xihuitl that the gods participated in the activities of the community and decided whether to provide rain, to avert the hail, or to bring victory to the marching armies: it was the stage upon which they played out their roles. Thus, while the xihuitl accurately reflected the year in its length, it was also a priestly creation insofar as it was broken up into cultically oriented periods. Priestly manipulation is especially evident in the so-called divine year, composed of four of these solar years. 23 The rituals specified for the fourth year of this divine year were elaborate and stressed special penitential rites connected with Quetzalcoatl, the creator of the calendar. A review of the solar year of the Aztecs is of interest. Herewith follows a list of the eighteen so-called months, each with their names and the deities especially honored therein. 24 Aztec cities were not necessarily consistent in selecting the month with which they began the year. In terms of our calendar this year can have begun on February 2, though a beginning as late as the March equinox is also indicated. Raising of Poles 1. Cuauhuitlehua 2. Tlacaxipehualiztli Flaying of Men Little Vigil 3. Tozoztontli 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

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Hueytozoztli Toxcatl Etzalcualiztli Tecuilhuitontli Hueytecuilhuitl

Great Vigil Drought(?) Eating of Succotash Little Feast of the Lords Great Feast of the Lords

Tlaloc Xipe Chicomecoatl and Tlaloc Cinteotl and Tlaloc Tezcatlipoca Tlaloc Xochipilli Xilonen

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The World, the Heavens, and Time | 25 9. Miccailhuitontli 10. Hueymiccailhuitl 11. Ochpaniztli 12. Teotleco 13. Tepeilhuitl 14. Quecholli 15. Panquetzaliztli 16. Atemoztli 17. Tititl 18. Izcalli

Little Feast of the Dead Great Feast of the Dead Sweeping of the Ways Arrival of the Gods Feast of the Mountains Roseate Spoonbill Raising of the Banners Descent of Water Stretching Reawakening

The ancestors and all the gods The Otomi form of Xiuhteuctli Toci and Chicomecoatl All the gods The Haloque and Xochiquetzal Mixcoatl Huitzilopochtli The Tlaloque Cihuacoatl Xiuhteuctli

In Central Mexico the first eleven of these months defined the agricultural part of the year, a time unit when the late winter frosts, problems of planting, weeding, and harvesting obsessed almost all sectors of the populace. As this season began Tlaloc, the god of rain, was appropriately honored first, followed immediately by that youthful god of the early spring, Xipe. Chicomecoatl, the mother of corn, dominated the central days of the planting period, but as the growing period began she was followed, curiously enough, by Tezcatlipoca. He can be there only because he was the god of contraries and reversals, the one who if rain were needed could deny it. There followed the period where judicious quantities of rain and sun were needed, so both Tlaloc and Xochipilli (the latter a solar god as well as a god of maize) were honored. Then as the ears of maize rapidly formed Xilonen, the maiden goddess who personified the sweet milkiness of the early ear, received her due. So far let us assume that the fields have survived but that, at any moment, unforeseen disasters could strike them, occasioned by the communities' neglect of the powers. Two of the months were therefore devoted to appeasing and feasting the departed dead, spirits who merge imperceptibly with the lesser gods. At this critical point the oldest and most venerable of the divine beings was also honored: the god of fire, master of the hearth and ultimate ancestor of all beings. Now came harvest home, a ritual wherein the several forms of the Great Mother were acknowledged, honored, and rewarded. Thus ended the agricultural portion of the year. All the gods at that point were supposed to have

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departed, having left behind a world emptied of the divine. Seven months remained. They run, in terms of our calendar, roughly from the end of September to some time in February. If the preceding months all belonged to the farmers, these later ones belonged variously to other social groups-warriors, hunters, priests, adolescents, and women. Now that the primary task of filling the corncribs had been completed, the interests of various other parties and of the state could be consulted. The remaining portion of the xihuitl began with the return of all the gods in a special and secret reentry into the community. We must keep in mind that, even though it was arbitrarily sliced up into twenty sections, the xihuitl was an integral event to the Aztecs, and this is why the twelfth month, the month that joined the two parts of the year, contained a ritual of all the gods. The xihuitl ended appropriately enough with a celebration of Xiuhteuctli, Lord of the Year, who thus sealed up his empire.

The Tonalpohualli or Sacred Year In a succeeding chapter we will note that the Aztec gods were not understood to be a logically related class of beings organized as families, clans, or states. Considering the Aztec's abiding desire to serve and placate the gods this may seem unusual, for where man's interests are in question he has usually sought to institutionalize the society of divine beings along lines familiar to him. To partly defuse the powers that ruled his universe and to make them more tractable, the Aztec fitted them into a conceptual framework inherited from his Mesoamerican past. He arbitrarily hacked out of the realm of time a portion which he called the tonalpohualli and to which he assigned authority to govern the gods and to constrain them to its mandate. This temporal answer to the problem of organizing the divine was most ingenious. By means of it the gods, both as a whole and individually, were made more comprehensible. Thus for the Aztecs the gods did not form a body-they existed collectively because they were set within the tonalpohualli, which thus became their constitution. The tonalpohualli is the cadre within which a divine meaning is to be found. It is the charter of the heavenly state, the written constitution of the heavens, and, one might almost say, the central principle of coherence in the Aztec cosmos. At a time in the remote past Mesoamerican priests had produced

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